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Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Luke Skywalker Reviewed & Wheel of Time Date Set

It is always good news when a new Matthew Stover novel is published, and in this case his most recent is Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which brings readers to the years immediately following Return of the Jedi. Although not Stover’s strongest effort, it was still an enjoyable adventure. Here’s a snapshot of the review:

What provided perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the novel is one of Stover’s strongest abilities as a storyteller – the examination of the hero. He’s given many ‘faces’ of the hero in his wonderful Acts of Caine sequence and here he puts one of the world’s most iconic heroes under the lens – Luke Skywalker. One of the more clever and entertaining ways by which Stover examines Luke as Hero is through the holo films in the Star Wars universe marketed, some may say, as propaganda for Skywalker’s heroics during the Galactic Civil War. One of the examples of this is through the “alternate” story as depicted in Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge. Such commentary can be seen as both how heroism can be twisted to fit the needs of a story one is trying to promulgate, while it can also be seen as a remark about the films themselves. Of course, the title itself is an Easter Egg of sorts – Revenge of the Jedi was the original tile of Episode VI. This examination of Skywalker also works very much like Stover’s excellent character examination of Darth Vader in the novelization of Revenge of the Sith.

In Internet terms, this is probably old news by now, but it seems as if Tor has set a November 2009 publication date for the first half of A Memory of Light the final volume of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I’ve gone on in the past about The Wheel of Time and will probably post more about it as I commence re-reading the series, but the short is that I’m looking forward to re-reading the first ten books I read in the series, catching up and reading the new one.